The invention disclosed herein is an improvement of my prior invention, U.S. Pat. No. 4,261,012, issued April, 1981. The prior art discussed in that patent is still considered to be the most relevant prior art.
This invention relates to a system of the type enabling a suject using the system to view a composite picture showing part of the subject himself (or herself) together with some separate article or object as though the subject were actually wearing such article. For instance, such a system when used in ladies bridal salon, might allow a customer to sample the effects of various wedding gowns and choose the most becoming one without actually having to try them on.
Systems of this general kind have already been proposed and have utilized various optical expedients for producing the composite picture. However, none of such prior art devices so far as known to applicant, have been entirely satisfactory.
Perhaps the simplest type of system used employes a semi-transparent mirror positioned before the subject, with means for positioning the actual articles to be displayed, at a suitable position behind the mirror, so that a subject when looking at the semi-transparent mirror will see the reflected image of his or her face or figure, together with the article, as seen by transparency through the semi-transparent mirror so that it will appear to be naturally joined with the reflected image. Systems of this kind are advantageously simply, but have the serious drawback that they require a large number of articles, samples or models to be physically present, and the system will in many instances involve a prohibited amount of storage space.
Other composite display systems have accordingly been proposed in which these difficulties are eliminated through the use of projection slides for displaying the images of the articles in the composite pictures, thereby dispensing with the need, for a physical presence of the actual articles. Slides of course are much easier to store in large numbers and more convenient to manipulate, than are the articles themselves.
Another system requires a black draped subject looking through a semi-transparent mirror, the reflection of her own face in the mirror is formed on the plane of a screen, together with the projected image of a slide formed by a projector on the screen. The slides represent headless models wearing different articles of clothing whereby the subject appears to see composite pictures of herself as though wearing the articles.
Although this system will allow a full figure composite image, it does so under conditions which are not entirely comfortable for the viewing subject, and has serious drawbacks. For the system to work, it must be used in a darkened room which many people find uncomfortable especially in the presence of strangers (salespeople/system operators). Further, the subject must sit with a black cape on her body from the neck down keeping her head fixed in a preset position so as not to misalign the composite image, additionally, there is an inherent inability to produce a composite image of dark or black skinned people. In producing the reflection of the viewer's face from the mirror, a black cape is used to black out the viewer's body below the neck, this ability of the mirror not to reflect the blacked out part of the viewer's body also makes it impossible for the mirror to reflect adequately a dark or black skinned face. Further, in order to have a common background for the composite image as seen in the mirror, the slides are photographed against a black background which will not allow a high quality (detail) reproduction in the slides of black articles of clothing. With this system, the operator attempts to correspond the body size of the projected image (model's body) to the viewer's body by means of a zoom lens on the projector. Inherently, a zoom lens will increase or decrease the size of its projected image proportionately in all directions. Therefore, with this apparatus, it is impossible to create a short fat image or a tall, thin image but rather only a short thin, tall fat or a well proportioned image in between which may or may not correspond with the viewer's own body. Another drawback of this system is the large amount of space it requires making its use impractical except in very large stores.
The prior art in this field is believed to be best represented by U.S. Pat. No. 1,133,311, wherein the subject's head and a garment are composed on a mirror; U.S. Pat. No. 2,722,600, superimposition of two separate images on a common screen; U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,730,565, and 3,576,945, composite pictures where background scenes are blended with a separate image; U.S. Pat. No. 3,398,664, directed to an automatic photoprocessor, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,849,596, directed to various techniques for using a television camera for automatic alignment of two images side-by-side.
None of the foregoing references teach a system which is compact, allows the customer to be photographed in an open area and allows the composite picture to be proportioned along at least one of two axes such that the image of the model's body can be adjusted to be proportioned to the customer's head.
My invention encompasses a composite display system which overcomes the difficulties of the prior art and which is convenient to use and operate, will enable a full figure, full sized display under comfortable conditions for the customer viewer, can be readily adjusted and operated by the system operator in order to view sequentially a series of composite full figure picture displays at a rate as fast or slow as desired.
My invention is broadly directed to a system for displaying to a customer, composite views including part of the customer together with the image of an article as though said article were actually associated with or worn by the customer, which system comprises means to record and display a portion of a body of a customer; means to store a plurality of images, which images when combined with the recorded portion of the customer will provide a full figure display; means to vary the dimensions of the stored image; means to combine and display the combined images.
The method of my invention of providing a proportioned full figure image which includes: displaying at least a portion of a customer on a medium, recording at least a portion of an article of clothing on a medium, combining the images to produce a full figure image, scaling of one of the images with respect to the other to provide a proportional full figured composite image.
The present invention as with the prior invention overcomes the prior art problems discussed therein and, further, this invention has the following advantages or improvements over my prior invention, namely, there is greater flexibility in scaling the height and width of the customer's body. That is, the whole X and/or Y and/or any portion or different portions of the X and/or Y can be scaled. The present invention, is not necessarily limited to making the subject's body taller or shorter, fatter or thinner; the model's body which originally modeled the garment can be scaled to the customer's overall measurements. Perferably, this is accomplished by stretching and/or shrinking rasters, horizontally and/or vertically, based on a calculated stretch and/or shrink factor. For example, I can scale the model which is stored in memory to the bust, hip, waist, and height measurements of the customer. A further improvement is that the skin tone of the model can be adjusted to more nearly simulate the skin tone of the customer.
In the preferred embodiment the system comprises a video camera, a frame grabber, a CPU, an image buffer, a memory, and a television monitor. The videocamera takes the image of the customer which is digitized by and stored in the frame grabber and ultimately displayed on a video screen. Pre-recorded articles of clothing to be combined with the image of the customer are stored. Through use of the central processing unit, at least one of the images, preferably that of the article of clothing are varied at least along horizontal and vertical axes to provide a proportioned full figured composite.